In the bright, warm autumn of 1947 that followed a chilly summer, several hundred bewildered 17-year-olds found the Ohio State University campus in Columbus swarming with an alien and formidable species: veterans. The war, though well over, was still more a reality than a memory. The Great Depression was over too, having disappeared insensibly in...
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The Poetry Lover
Laurence Lieberman’s two dozen essays on contemporary American poets—some (Robert Lowell, Robert Penn Warren) well known, others (Mark Strand, Frederick Morgan) not—are written in the self-expressive and dithyrambic mode of D.H. Lawrence and James Dickey. Lieberman wants literary criticism to be “personal and instinctively charged,” to carry an “electric pulse that is nakedly alive.” He...